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Forum:Beyond the Wiki
Dear Fans, the time has come for me to leave this wiki, too. I have been reluctant to do this but it can be no longer avoided. I can no longer afford the time to work here anymore. As the last of the old guard I will leave with you my story, the secrets and the future of the two Seikai wikis. I am the one called ALMAEL. I have been a member of The Abh Nation since before it became the world's largest and most complete Seikai fan website. I wasn't among the first fans at all but thanks to the amazing members of the Abh Nation my insights grew daily. Some of them are perhaps still more knowledgeable than me. Despite the Abh Nations greatness it was nowhere near an encyclopedia. I was working on a Seikai game mod then, and the need for detailed references became inevitable. So I founded the Laburec Library on top of my old website. It was to provide immediate and concise information. Before long it grew to be more than I ever imagined. Sometime later, the one you know here as Boscolai1991 founded this wiki at wikia, then still new and shiny. I merely helped by discussing the contents and giving special information sessions. Boscolai1991 and other members of Abh Nation worked hard to create and set the standard of this wiki. It was mature since day one and we are proud of it. For a time, I disappeared for personal reasons but came back nonetheless. I went on to be project leader of the novel translation project. Unfortunately, the Abh Nation was already in its last days, and many drifted or left to other shores. Together with others I tried to hold the community together. We have not been successful and our community is still fractured. I am still holding the gates of the Kin of the Stars open but its future is uncertain. Along with the translation project and certain wikia edit incidents I had to step up on this wiki. It wasn't easy but I managed to pull it out from a state of chaos and put it back into order. A lot of other things happened then, too. As the world economy fell, contents on the net, even whole sites along with their creators disappeared. Many may believe that information is never lost on the net, but that's not quite right. The only information that is never lost is the one people like to spread. It's always a part of an original source never the whole source itself. The majority of information is doomed to be lost. Over time they become nothing but a myth. We were worried. We started to discuss the future of this wiki. I didn't want to leave our kawai future fans wandering helplessly through the net. I wanted to leave behind our hard collected knowledge of this unique universe. So I pushed for the idea of safety in numbers. Along with the changes with wikia we concluded we needed another wiki for safekeeping. We wanted to make sure a wiki will be there for you. Along with Boscolai1991's approval I set up the second wiki at Seikai.shoutwiki which is still being managed by me with some help from the shoutwiki staff. It is not our intention to destroy the wiki at wikia. We did not delete it like many others did. We decided to keep it open to everyone. This is the place where all fans can take part for good or for worse. We had great expectation in the new wiki. I used this opportunity to clean up and fixed its long standing faults. As with the Laburec Library it was to be able to allow direct editing of Baronh. I put links and names into order and schemes. It was all to ensure the wiki stays canon and can serves as a seed for a future wiki should disaster strike again. In short the Seikai.shoutwiki serves as our main core, our wiki seed, and our backup. It shall be protected and it shall not be tampered with lightly. I will not tolerate inappropriate edits. However, we welcome everyone who's interested. We would prefer it to be edited by experienced editors, though. This means you have know what you are writing about. We don't expect you to be perfect. I do make errors, too. As a sign of us valuing quality there is no editing counter at Seikai.shoutwiki. With my limited time I have been giving it more attention which made it grow bigger in time. However, I expect the more active wiki to become better one day as it already shows with some articles. Some of you may think "why creating trouble by creating two sites?" It certainly is true entropy can be troublesome to manage. If you imagine there's always one site with a well build structure and less tampered content to fall back to. Or as I envision it, it will to serve as a seed for rebuilding. Actually, it would be desirable if both can serve that purpose but in the end only one can be it. Only a major crisis can prove me right or wrong. Hopefully, you will never have to find out. In a way, the shoutwiki can be considered the alpha of the wikis, while the wikia wiki the open and more fandom beta wiki. And perhaps that's a distinction and a necessary separation needed for any fan base to thrive. There is something about having a canon wiki to refer to, and another wiki where you can play around with and perhaps even expand beyond canon. I think that's a very good setup and relationship. I will leave that to you to decide and I hope you will come to appreciate both. I am very pleased to see the new staff members here are doing so well. You have proven yourselves capable and reliable. It is difficult for me to have to leave but I feel relieved to know it will be in good hands. I will stay a bit longer with the Seikai.shoutwiki. I will put everything I know into it. I will try to lay out a proper structured link map for you to take over. The reality is I will not be able to come close to finishing it. From the Laburec Library I already know it can have somewhere between 600 and 8000 article entries in its final form with the information that are available today. Eventually, there will be a time when I have to leave the shoutwiki, too. And it may be sooner than expected. Sometime in the near future, the translation project will have finished the Seikai no Senki 5 novel and, eventually, everything else, too. This is by far not the end for you to look for as a fan. Seikai no Senki is just the first arc. More novels will come out for the Seikai universe. Even if it does not continue there are still over a hundred (soon to be 200) seikai related fan and art books out there for you to explore. Not all of them may be canon but fandom cannot thrive without support, imagination and creativity. You may find your way to the Project Lafiel and enjoy some of the available fandom there. There are others elsewhere. The community may look small but we have long spread to all corners of the net. There are Baronh dictionaries available in all major and diverse languages, more so than the wikis. It is even part of recognized language specific encyclopedias. Even if you are in some no-mans-land like Sibiria we have the ushwood.ru for you. It wasn't easy to come this far. We had our failures, mistakes and regrets. I know I did. Despite everything do not forget the wikis are not everything there is. There is so much more out there. The wikis contain our knowledge and perhaps some of our memories. It is our wish to save you the painstaking trouble we went through over the years to obtain the information. As a leader it is not my duty to guard the community but to guard the future of the community. I hope the wikis are good enough for you. Even though, we older fan generation will be gone eventually, we are leaving all these great sites and their contents about this great Seikai universe behind for you. Use them as the foundation to build on and expand. I hope it was all worth the effort and that you will carry on as I did and do better. Today, January 10th, 2014, my time has come to take my mantle and leave the wikia wiki. Good luck to all of you. Daisielle! Signed, ALMAEL, Director General of the Laburec Library, the Laburec Historic Records & Archieves, the Laburec R & D, the Laburec Publishings and Commander of Kin of the Stars. Dated, January 10th, 2014